Research Interests

Brief Biography

Professor Hennessy initiated the MIPS project at
Stanford in 1981, MIPS is a high- performance Reduced Instruction Set Computer
(RISC), built in VLSI. MIPS was one of the first three
experimental RISC architectures. In addition to his role in the basic research,
Hennessy played a key role in transferring this technology to industry. During
a sabbatical leave from Stanford in 1984-85, he cofounded MIPS Computer Systems
(later MIPS Technologies Inc. and now part of
Imagination Technologies), which
specializes in the production of chips based on these concepts. He also led the
Stanford
DASH (Distributed Architecture for Shared Memory) multiprocessor project.
DASH was the first scalable shared memory multiprocessor with hardware-supported
cache coherence. More recently, he has been involved in FLASH (FLexible Architecture for Shared Memory), which is designed
to support different communication and coherency approaches in large-scale
shared-memory multiprocessors. In the 1990s, he served as the Founding Chairman of the Board of
Atheros, an early wireless chipset company, now part of Qualcomm.Hennessy
is also the coauthor of two widely used textbooks in computer architecture.